Launches of any number of new sets of Magic the Gathering cards go pretty badly, with products routinely snapped up before most can get the site to load, and in-store stock chances few and far between. So it takes a pretty special scale of dreadful for it to result in an unfettered mea culpa from Wizards of the Coast. That’s what’s followed yesterday’s attempted launch of Chaos Vault’s The Zeta Set, an especially interesting and uniquely designed set of Secret Lair reprints that had the community buzzing. “It was a disaster,” says WotC today. “There’s no other way to say it.”
The Zeta Set was co-created with New York arty bunch MSCHF, designed in part to look like early prototype designs for cards, depicted with collages of stock images and fanzine-like cut-out text, presented in fuzzy, scratchy designs that look incredible. The stand-out card was the new print of Eternity Vessel, here depicted as a photograph of a graded slab of the original card, scored only a 6. Clearly this set was going to be sought after, and so Wizards prepared potential customers with 24 hours of warning ahead of the launch, instructions for a pre-queuing system, and promises of a randomized order of access to purchases for those who showed up an hour early.
Instead what happened, according to those who attempted to buy the cards, was the hour-long queue ahead of launch was paused after just half an hour, then only unpaused 90 minutes later, and eight minutes on from that all stock was gone. Others in the EU report that the set went from “available” to “out of stock” while the queue was frozen. However, even for those who were able to clear the queues still seem to have failed to buy cards. According to Wizards’ apology,
- If you did complete an order, thank you for sticking with us through the wait.
- If you’re not sure if you completed an order but think you might have, we’re working through those.
- Similarly, if you received a duplicate confirmation email, don’t be alarmed.
- If you don’t receive a confirmation email within 24 hours but think you did purchase The Zeta Set, please reach out to our Customer Support team and they’ll help get it sorted. We’re getting a ton of contacts there right now and are going through them as fast as possible.
There are reports from customers who believed they had made purchases, but never received a confirmation email, and are currently left in the dark.
“We’re incredibly sorry for the experience,” WotC says in its statement, “and we’re trying to get to the bottom of it. We are in the process of investigating exactly what went so very wrong and will share more as soon as we’re able to untangle the mess and understand the root cause—be it an internal systems issue or external tampering.”
The Hasbro-owned company goes on to say that it “may take a little while to fully get our heads around it,” and describes the whole experience as “frustrating and disappointing” for customers.
Whether you made it through the queue or not, we are going to try and make this right. Once we have a better sense of orders that actually got through, failed orders that we can track, and everything in between, we’ll come back and share as much as we can.
We’ve reached out to WotC to ask for more details regarding the situation, and will update should they get back to us.